Nun hat er nichts mehr lieb
by ainokitsune
Summary: Memefic. Sam always was a dog person.  Post 7.03.


Memefic. The prompt was: "So Sam is having a really bad time with post-concussion crap and hallucinations and basically feeling overwhelmed and everything, and there's this little stray puppy that keeps crying at the door of Rufus's cabin. Naturally Sam starts leaving it food, but he discovers slowly how much the little guy is helping him feel grounded and needed and capable, and taking care of the puppy is something he can do well and reliably, and it gives him a reason to get up."**  
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><p><strong>Nun hat er nichts mehr lieb<strong>

The trees are tired and leaves litter the ground around the cabin. Sam kicks his way through curves of desiccated brown, fragile and hollow as pieces of skulls. There are long feathers in the litter. Pinions. He half-stoops, reaching out automatically, and the world tilts and his skin threatens to slide off his face. He straightens sharply, groping for the wall of the cabin behind him. His knees shiver.

He pinches the bridge of his nose with his good hand. The other won't be right again for a long while. Not with the damage he's managed to do to it, again and again and again. The stitches have been redone twice already—once at the hospital and again about a week ago, by a pale Bobby who wouldn't meet Sam's eyes as he carefully worked the needle through the ragged edges of flesh.

He tries flexing it, watches the play of skin and thread over muscles and the hint of bone. Something moves in the trees, at the edge of his vision, something long and thin flashing through the shadows. He jerks his head in that direction and his hand twinges in sympathy. And he knows. He _knows._

"Shit," he says, to no one, and goes back inside.

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><p>Dean's unconscious a lot of the time. A lot. The TV whispers all around the room. Sam stands in the doorway and listens to the dry noise, like feathers and the rustling of skirts. Fragile breezes, breaths from ruined bodies. He bites his lip and looks at the screen. Lucifer winks from behind the glass, and then it's shapeless bodies, shadows and static and he's not sure if the bodies are real, or the static is.<p>

His hand doesn't hurt and he absently bites at the web of skin between thumb and finger, but nothing changes. The walls don't even stutter.

"Dean," he murmurs, and again. "_Dean_." But his brother doesn't answer and the TV says, "_Shh, shh_."

Outside, something scrabbles at the door. Sam flinches, backs into the kitchen. He can still hear the TV, and his own heart sudden and huge, a fist clenching and unclenching, winding his blood thicker than threads around his other organs. He realizes he's stopped breathing and drags in a gasping breath.

There's a quiet cry. A devastated noise, from a mouth made to be broken. Sam squeezes both his hands together and, when he's used to the pain pulsing from his hand up to his elbow, hollowing his bones and blood out, he moves for the door.

Whatever it is cries again. Sam shuts his eyes. There were things out under the trees. Maybe that's all this is. Stretched out shadows and, and bodies and something winking at him from inside the glass.

Or maybe it's something else.

OOOO

Sam's seen a lot of weird shit in his life. He'd be the first to admit that the face he sees in the mirror every day is probably one of the weirdest. He's seen ghosts dragging their own entrails along behind them, he's seen blood run red and hot from an animated corpse. He's seen (_theinsideof the cage Lucifer's home redand redand fat yellow and glistening purples)_ his own peeling skin on the palm of his hand, and he knows there's a joke there somewhere, held together with stitches and razor wire and bone, but for the life of him can't remember what it is. Dean would know. He would know.

But he sure as hell wouldn't know what to do about _this_.

Sam knows he's staring. Down. A _long_ way down, but in his defense he's also being stared _at_, and it's not something he's really equipped to handle right now. Big liquid eyes bore into his own and he can't remember the last time he blinked. He remembers the sound of claws and _this isn't what he saw under the trees_ and then he flinches at the tiny, hopeless _whuff_ from the little body at his feet.

His good hand thumps the doorframe. The puppy flinches, and whines.

It's a goddamn _dog._ Dean is gonna be _pissed._

Sam tastes the smile that flickers around his face. He tries to suppress it, drag it back under cover, but his lips keep parting. He knows he must look like a freak but the damn dog (puppy, too small to _live_) just lowers its head onto its paws and stares. It doesn't make any more noises. Just waits.

Sam isn't sure what it's waiting for. Isn't sure he wants to know.

"Hey," he says, softly, under the noise of the trees, "Hey there. You hungry?"

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><p>It needs a name. He can't just keep calling it 'damn dog.' It's been a week already.<p>

A week. Dean's been half out of his mind for a week on pain, and meds, and whatever he's getting his hands on that he's not supposed to be drinking until Sam catches him at it. He's here but he's not, and most of the time Bobby's running in and out, caching books and files and microfilm, and Sam _swears_ honest-to-God ancient scrolls and tablets. The TV runs constantly. Sometimes Dean watches it. Sometimes Sam sits in the room with him and mostly ignores whatever's going on, and reads or breathes or tries to ignore the streams of Spanish and Enochian coming from the speakers and the walls.

He doesn't know why Dean's only watching in Spanish. He suspects that maybe the problem is Sam's only _hearing_ in Spanish. He's not about to ask Dean about it, though. He can't bear another one of those _looks._

So he goes outside, and stares at the mutt.

It's about as big as Sam's hand. A little bigger, maybe, but not by much. Just a ball of fur and eyes and too-big paws, little stub of a tail that wags now, and ribs that don't poke through as much as they did seven days ago.

It's a _she_, Sam learned, two days back, and since then he's been running through all the female-appropriate names he can come up with, but so far nothing really feels right. Nothing _sticks_, and now he kneels down and absently pets her soft, stiff-furred back and stares into the trees with unfocussed eyes.

"Wendy," he says, to the wind, but that would make him Peter Pan, or at least one of the Lost Boys, and sure Sam's wanted a lot of impossible things in his life, but that was never really one of them. He lets the name roll around in his head. _Tiger Lily_ is out too. He has a vague sense that something terrible happened to her at the end of the book, though he thinks he might be getting his stories mixed up.

"Carol," he tries, but that's a name for a DMV employee. All the names that pop into his head are too human. _Jean. Emma. Cora. Sarah, Rachel, Ruth. _What kind of name is right for a dog? A ball of fur, wiggly and fuzzy, hungry enough to lick the tips of his fingers when he digs the Spam out of the cupboard and plops it cold and glistening on a plate and accidentally gets some on himself. What do you call something like that?

It licks his fingers, and wriggles in pleasure. Sam props his chin in his good hand, and sighs.

"Dumb dog," he says fondly, and she yaps at him, and wags her tail.

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><p>The stitches come out for good, and neither Bobby nor Dean give him any warnings about what to do with the injury now that it's healed. The scar is pink and bright and Sam turns it and turns it, watching the light flicker and shine on its surface.<p>

He goes to see (_SarahJessicaRachel) _the stupid dog and hunkers down beside it, running his good hand over her tiny head, scratching behind the floppy ears. Her tongue lolls out. Her skull is so small, so fragile. She'll never survive in this world on her own.

She whines and bounces and he reaches down with his other hand, the scarred one, and it plops onto her back, above the knob of spine, and it must not have been as healed as he and Bobby thought. A tiny pain fizzes just under the skin, licks at the bones and tendons, and the dog flickers, just for an instant, and Sam can see the leaves and feathers and dead grass in the space where she was.

Then the pain's gone, and she looks up at him, eyes liquid and wanting, but Sam's already on his feet, back to the door, and he can hear his heart and taste the bitterness of loss already. He swallows and swallows again. He'll never get the taste out of his mouth.

"Oh," he says quietly, to no one. "Oh.

He turns away, goes back inside.

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><p>She follows him around the house. The nameless thing. The mutt, the goddamn dog, the whatever-it-is. Follows him around, nails clacking on the floor, and she cries. She cries through Dean's telenovelas and she cries over Lucifer, who's back and hanging around in the corner whenever he can get away with it. She cries at the door when Sam shuts himself in the bathroom and splashes water on his face over and over. She whimpers and she whines and clatters all over the place and Sam can hear her even when he can't see her. He sits on the couch, on the arm of the couch, perched next to Dean's head, and makes himself watch his brother's stupid show, and just about manages to contain the flicker of his eyes or the cringing of his shoulders every time the damn puppy makes that sound. That desolate, horrible noise.<p>

He just about manages, anyway. Until Dean looks up at him, with sharp, too-knowing eyes, mouth pressed into a line. Sam catches the glance, startles back, nearly slides off the arm of the couch.

Dean spits, "For God's sake, Sam, go feed your damn dog."

Sam licks his lips and flicks a rapid glance at the door, at the puppy watching him with imploring eyes.

He looks back at his brother, but Dean doesn't say anything else.

-the end-

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><p>I have got to learn to stop leaving drive-by comments on prompts. <em>This keeps happening to me.<em>

I'm not taking responsibility for this one, though. I wrote this over the course of a couple hours. No real edits, since it's comment-fic.

Title From Rilke's The Song of the Waif.


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